Substitute with Molasses
by snappleducated
Summary: "I said, don't look at them. When we leave this place, they'll watch us. They'll wonder what happens next. Most of them will be right, but I'd like to think I have a little more imagination than the average person. So what do you think? What happens next?" AKA some people suck at breaking up.


**Notes** : I sent this thing when it was about 1/3rd formed to AgathaCrispy. It had no plot or structure or idea of itself. It was like a bunch of ripped up magazine articles in a folder kept by an obsessive detective. Her job was to tell me if I should set this thing on fire and walk away. She saved its life. Thank you sestra asshole, you are cool and like good music.

* * *

It isn't embarrassing to say he loves the Pathfinder. Love is a beautiful, selfless emotion. Love by itself is a celebration, an appreciation, an acknowledgement.

He can't say it. It should be easy. But the truth, his hunger, it hangs behind that beautiful love like a mousetrap, a guillotine. To love someone is to say you want most of them, but caring enough to leave just a little bit behind. Just a little bit of room, so she could continue existing as a separate person, one that lived without and beyond him.

And that isn't really true. And they aren't really together.

"You said you came out here to be someone. So who did you become?"

"I became the Charlatan. I became no one."

She considers him. Her glass is half empty, not half full. People become beautiful when they have known enough suffering to understand the balance of loss. Ryder twirls her glass, letting whiskey slide up to the edge, to the rim. He watches her.

"If you spill it, you better lick it up."

Her smile is a knife, stabbing him. "Pervert."

"Should I say it's fine if you pour the whole bottle over the counter? That would also be true."

She clicks her tongue, unperturbed. "I bet you got people into trouble when you were a kid."

Reyes doesn't answer her. He reaches over to push her glass, and she saves it, pulls it away from him. "I just want to play with you," he complains. "It'll be fun. You'll like it."

"I'm sure." She drinks. Her glass is more than half empty, so is their bottle. She squints at him. "It's your fault I can't trust you. You know that."

"Of course," Reyes accepts, graciously. "I'm a criminal overlord and I sometimes lie to you in misguided attempts to minimize your own corruption. Also, generally, I want you to like me."

"It's good that you know." Ryder snorts. "It doesn't seem like you're going to do anything about it, but at least you don't pretend."

"Don't trust me," Reyes agrees, with sincerity. "I don't know what you'd have to give up, if you did."

She eyes him for a moment, but lets this slide. They've been breaking up a lot, lately. She nudges into him, sliding off her barstool, and he pivots to hold her against him. "No one messes with me anymore," Ryder says. She grins and nudges him harder. "Not on Kadara, anyway. Is that because of you?"

"Of course," he smiles. It is reflex, by now, to smile at her. She bounces back on her heels, up to the balls of her feet. She kisses his face in six different places, her mouth too soft, too warm. He wants to fight beneath it, the endless layers. He'll start with the first.

"That's it?" Reyes teases. He catches her hip. Just one hip. Just one hand. He tries not to hold her too tightly. "Worldwide twenty-percent discounts just aren't enough for you?"

"I want a third off."

"I want it all off."

" _Ugh_ ," she groans, but still giggles. She almost rolls against him. Her eyes shine up at him. Today her nails are painted mauve. Today, she seems innocent. "I want to know. Are all the guys this cool, where you're from?"

"Definitely. All of us," Reyes agrees He keeps smiling. "You can never go there. Promise me."

"I can't. It would mean leaving you six hundred years behind." She smiles. Her smile is different than his, in a way he can never explain. She gleams at him, the golden figure that stands atop trophies. An ice cap in the sunlight. When he drinks and he thinks of her, she is so cold that his hands being to burn.

"Never," he agrees. He watches her face, how the bar lights move against it, the beams colliding on her surfaces as they fall. Would she look different, if there was some way to see her in the dark?

Her cheek on his chest, her hips swinging sideways and back, almost dancing. She holds him, asking, "What about me? Do you ever wonder where I came from?"

"You come from a place I can never go to. I could know everything about it, and it still wouldn't be enough."

Her laughter was embarrassed. "So, what would be enough for you?"

He turns his face into her hair. "Impossible," he tells her.

* * *

They break up when Liam takes a shot to the arm. He'd gotten it by jumping in front of his Pathfinder, probably saving her life, as a woman in old armor and older skin swears, reloads. The reports say she'd gone down screaming about the Charlatan's whore, the Initiative's lies. Five minutes on the net show that her son hadn't survived cryo.

As usual, Ryder takes it hard. She spends the night arguing, kissing, breaking free of him. When she gets drunk enough she won't stop holding her arm, the same place Kosta had been shot. When it's just getting to early morning he coaxes her to bed and she lies awake facing him, her expression uneasy, a mess of contradictions.

"What if I had just been a regular person?" she baits him. She's always baiting him, testing her safety nets. "I bet you wouldn't have cared about me at all."

"That's a stupid argument," Reyes counters. "If you were just a regular person, you wouldn't be yourself. It's like if I asked whether you'd like me without my amazing flair for adventure."

It's a shame her mouth is always so cut up, so hurt. She has pretty lips. She bites one now. "I think that I _feel_ like an ordinary person, though."

Reyes laughs. He pulls her lip free, as carefully as he can with the scabs. "Don't do that," he murmurs. "Don't apologize. Not to anyone."

She looks across at him, eyes pulling all over his face. Where does she look the longest? "I want to tell you something stupid." She admits. "It's dumb and I know it's dumb and I don't know how to say it either. I know that if I try it will just get worse."

"Sounds frustrating."

"It is." She blinks. For a second, his gut clenches, certain she's about to cry. She blinks again. " _You're_ frustrating."

"In a good way?" He touches her shoulder, the sweeps of skin that fold there. Less muscle mass than expected, all lean. Her specialty is endurance. Her face is slitted with sleep.

"Good and bad," she yawns. A tiny sound. "It won't be forever. It's just right now. It doesn't makes sense, us being together now. You know."

"Whatever you want," Reyes agrees. He strokes her hair until she sleeps, then lies awake thinking.

Again.

* * *

They should have started off by asking: do you see this going anywhere?

She laughs. Her throat moves. He watches the shadow at the corner of her mouth fall into darkness. Her teeth are very white. "I can't think about the future, something like that," she says. He can see her giggles, in the creases that form as she wrinkles her nose. Her whole body will twist with delight. Her body will twist, to avoid him.

"Something like that," Reyes echoes. He matches her, step for step. She raises shields, erects turrets. Her enemies lie dead around her. "Something like that," Reyes says again. "How cosmopolitan."

"I prefer interstellar," she shoots back. She winks. She can't wink. Her whole face collapses around the effort of her wink. They've crouched down for cover, her ankle is just inches from his hand. He can't help how easy it is to catch her.

"Come here," he coaxes. He pulls her leg out from under her, towards him. Her balance rocks sideways and she tilts into the boulder they'd hidden behind. Her shoulder catches there, painfully—her teeth flash again, a grimace.

"Can you wait?"

"I'm sick of waiting."

When she kisses him, her fingers are like claws, tearing through armor and clothes alike to gouge at his bones. He wants to call her something special, a pet name. But nothing will ever fit. Like their bodies, which do not slide so much as grind together, two solids refusing to melt.

A shotgun blast takes out a chunk of their boulder. Reyes throws a lazy grenade. She is hot beneath and against him, a furnace that he knows is constructed, a pain he can imagine divine.

"Not now," she struggles free of him. "Not now."

Love comes down to timing.

* * *

It's frustrating, her timeline. The way she can curve and turn and roll back on herself, no trajectory, forever intercepted by a thousand different pleas. Like a missile that's been blasted into the air, all he wants is to catch her. Like a ball that's been thrown at the sun, she soars too high for him to guess where she falls.

He likes the sort of people who are dangerous, beautiful. A quick burn, an ember, a thing better admired than touched. He burns himself with them, grows calluses. He becomes older.

"Not now," she says, again, always. Turning away from him, too slowly, her heart as bright as her cheeks, she is always conveniently just a little too slow to get away from him. Most people would call the Pathfinder a warm person. She is, she seems that way. She is honest and funny and friendly, good at parties, loyal. An all-American kind of sweet. He likes her for this, sincerely admires these traits even as he condescends to them.

She wears nail polish, all shiny, an old vanity. Silly. She likes purples, especially on bad days. He'd done a run with her when supplies had started sneaking off from Kadara's new outpost. It took less than an hour to find her outpost's thief. The man was forgettable, old, offering a cut of his profits for mercy.

Her fingers tipped pale lilac, as she aims, fires. Without expression, she shoots the man almost exactly between his eyes. A few millimeters to the left. Without a single breath of hesitation. His face, her crew, the body. All staring at her, stunned. She holsters her weapon.

"Don't waste my time," she tells the dead man, the air that comes whistling free of his lungs. Her voice is very soft. Her voice is _freezing_.

Then she turns, and she looks him straight in the face, and her expression crumples. Without another word, she walks away from them, her hands bent into hammers, swinging heavily at her sides. Peebee glances at him, shrugs. "I know, I know. I don't think she's getting a lot of sleep, okay? Maybe keep this on the DL." After a beat she adds, " _Don't_ talk to her, she's vulnerable." And then she stares at him expectantly.

So he goes after her. Her fingers are still curled into fists. Does she flinch with every footstep? It's been too long. She not always the same.

"So," he starts, hoping that something will come next. "Coffee later?"

"I can't get coffee with you," she says, hollowly. He looks at her more carefully, the things that a diet of supplements and perfect rations can't hide. Exhaustion didn't leave a person's skin so easily.

"I can come to you, then. A secret."

" _No_ ," she says, insistent. She pauses, collects herself. "No. I can't. We're supposed to be—nothing."

It's been months. "We aren't nothing, though."

"Aren't we?" she laughs. Nothing about her is happy. "You. Me. _Us_. A beautiful frame without a picture to fill it. Something empty that just sits on your shelf forever." She laughs again. No, he's wrong, she's crying. She cries likes she's laughing. "I'm so stupid." She tells him, herself.

Before he can think of a rebuttal or an excuse, she drives herself away from him, her arms still, elbows locked. "This—we aren't together. This isn't a relationship. Stop it. Stop it."

"Are you doing to do this to me again?" he asks her. It's mean. He's always so much worse than he wants to be.

"Seriously? You're using guilt?" she laughs. Her face, her body is shattered, but standing. She won't stop shaking her head. "I can't believe this. You. Me. I'm _here_ again. You make me _hate myself_ —" she shuts herself up and away, in some cloud. Somewhere highly classified, somewhere else. It makes him sick, to realize that he still doesn't know her at all.

It makes him afraid, how ready he is to beg. There are an infinite number of things he wants to tell her. They choke him.

"I should go," she says miserably. "I was stupid. I shouldn't have—I shouldn't have tried to be casual. With you. Whatever that means. Some of that's on me, so, I'm sorry. Sorry."

"Why did you even come back?" Reyes snaps. He takes three, angry steps forwards. He could catch her. He could hold her. For a second he imagines—he doesn't know, the space opera of his childhood, the magnificent actors standing eighty feet tall, who kiss at the birth of a sun. An image that began as innocent, then tarnished with age, as he grew older, learned the heft of a salacious metaphor.

But wasn't he the villain? The man who thought he was powerful enough to just take people, just pluck them away from their lives, and use them however he wanted?

But she is the hero of this story. And she is brave when she admits, "I came back to you because I'm an idiot, and I want you. But that isn't enough. It isn't more than the galaxy, it isn't more than the Initiative, and it isn't more than you or me. There is no room for compromise when our problems are bigger than we could ever personally be."

It isn't about sneaking around or getting caught. At some point, her fears had grown deeper.

"What if things were different?" Reyes asks her. "What if we were different?"

She rubs her sleeve roughly, a long swipe—across her eyes. "Don't be dumb," she mumbles. "I told you. You wouldn't like me if I was ordinary."

"Then what about me?" he asks. She stares at him. He doesn't really know if he means it.

Ryder sighs. "You could never be ordinary."

"No? Then what about _us_. We could be ordinary. Just two people, together. It doesn't have to be a catastrophe."

"Then why does it always become one?" she asks. He hadn't laid so much as a hand on her shoulder, but it still feels like she shakes him loose when she leaves.

* * *

A first: they break up while they aren't even together.

But it isn't like she can avoid him forever. Politically, professionally, she needs him. Not that he wants to hold that over her, but still. It's true. He waits out their few stilted, awkward interactions. At some point he admits that he's never really imagined a future where she doesn't come back to him, and maybe this is wrong - but she still looks at him first, when she walks into a room. He can still make her blush, just by calling her name.

He sets about torturing her.

"What's this?" Ryder jumps when he leans around the edge of her chair, dropping sandwiches on the bar for her.

"You looked hungry, that's all," he says, with such mildness that she'd look childish to refuse.

She eats her sandwich with suspicion.

He presses this opening, switches it up with coffee, with company, with—

"I want you to know," Ryder tells him as she swallows the last of her ham sandwich, perhaps the twenties or thirtieth sandwich in his campaign, "that you are not subtle and I do not acknowledge anything. Your efforts have been _wasted_. I was using you for your resources and because I don't know where you're buying croissants."

Reyes shrugs, following her out of the port's customs inspection room, down the ramp, on the lift to Kadara's slums. She doesn't seem to mind. "What's on today's agenda?"

A month ago, she wouldn't have told him. "Oh. This guy, Castello, running some kind of strip club out in the wastes. Someone reported him for pushing out drugs, some of his workers look pretty young. I dunno, we'll see."

"You should be careful," Reyes offers. "I've heard about him too. Lots of under the table stuff, _more_ than just drugs. In a way that isn't a party for all those who attend. Especially the people who don't even know where they are."

For a second her face becomes stiff, then it fades. She works hard to seem unflappable. "What's so bad about that?" she jokes, now rolling out her shoulders, loosening her neck and her hips. She's always like this before a mission. Wound up, a spring of kinetic energy that pumps, jumps. He will never try to teach her stillness. Her hair is rough, a mess only barely restrained by elastic. Ghostly wisps fly around her face, stick to the sweat on her neck. "Sex clubs sound relaxing compared to my normal Wednesdays."

She shouldn't be so glib. He catches her by the roots of her hair and yanks her back into him. She gasps, head cracked back, neck straining and exposed. In less than a second he lets her go. "Careful," he says, mildly. "Freaks out there."

She spins to face him, her mouth open. Her eyebrows climb into her bangs. She just stares at him, shocked. "What was that?" she says suddenly. A passing, bashful glance. She looks away.

"What do you think?"

She licks her lips, the picture of hesitation. "I don't know. _Shut up_."

She stomps away.

* * *

She comes back to him by banging on his door loudly enough for half the patrons in Tartarus to evacuate. Reyes pulls open the door, and winces. She's covered in blood, flushed with exertion, almost radiating heat. Her eyes are fever-bright. "I want to be with you," she says. "But before that, can you let me hit you just once?"

He spreads his arms. "Go for it."

She's already made a fist. Her arm pulls back. "I mean it. I hit really hard. I'm really, really angry."

"I get it."

He has good eyes. Good enough to make out the hint of a quiver, rattling her fist. "It's messed up."

"I can take a punch," he says.

She winds up and punches him hard in the left pectoral, harder than he had expected but not harder than he had feared. She stays frozen, her arm stretching across the distance between them, rigid. Her fist begins to slip. "Did it hurt?"

"It hurt."

For a second, her lip quivers. She pulls it in, holds it hostage with her teeth. He hopes she won't apologize, but she does. "I'm sorry that when I spoke just now, I made it sound like you sit around pining for me, wrapped in the throes of absolute misery."

"I'm sorry for assuming you hit me because you couldn't stop thinking about me."

She sniffs. "It's true, you jerk."

"Stop leaving me," he answers. "I miss you. Just let it be."

She takes one step, then another, and her forehead collides with his shoulder, and she makes a frustrated little sound. He's afraid to put his arms around her, afraid this will be too much. He holds her fingertips instead, squishes the skin there. Real.

"I hit you because I don't think you believe me when I say we're breaking up. I'm frustrated. Probably with you, definitely with myself."

"Hm," Reyes acknowledges. He does not particularly care to confirm or deny this point. She lets him put his hands, almost delicately, against her hip bones. "We haven't changed."

"It makes me furious."

"It makes _me_ hopeful. The world is always changing. If we stay the same, one day you'll get that chance you're looking for." Now, he coaxes back from her, strokes the catch of her jaw. "It'll be okay. Trust me."

"You told me not to trust you."

"You came back, didn't you?"

"Fine," she mutters. She caves against him.

And so he kisses her again, and again, and again.

* * *

After that it gets easier. If she doesn't give in, she makes peace with limbo. She tries not to think about what her father would say. He tries not to give her everything at once, and mostly, succeeds. The key is not thinking. The key is squeezing each day for what it has. The key is agreeing when Ryder calls a date a meeting.

On that note: dinner. Adults, the people in movies, they went to dinner. He wants to take her to dinner, the best dinner in Andromeda. He wants to see her face when she eats something delicious, that sense of luxury. She should have a better life, nicer things.

Strictly business, he understands. She doesn't have a dress. "Can I wear my formal uniform?" she asks, biting her lip.

"Do you want to?"

"Not really," she admits. "But it's not like there are ball gowns on Kadara."

"Aren't there?" he was expecting more resistance. In the end she chooses something navy, classy but subdued, impeccably cut. She can't shake her military heart.

The first course is fish. Nobody asks what kind of fish. These things have not been named yet. "This is nice," Ryder smiles. "Solid meeting."

By the time dessert rolls around she's worked her way through the tasting menu, and the wine list that goes with it. She lounges with her elbows on the table, feet tucked behind his ankles, a friendly flirtatiousness warming her. "Delicious," she purrs. "I mean it. So good. Thank you."

She'd eaten everything. Every single bite. Her lips are stained a rough purple from her wine. Dessert comes as two perfect spheres of creamy chocolate. Ryder sighs, blissfully.

"You defeated the menu."

"I skipped lunch for this." She ignores her fork. One long, slender finger digs into her chocolate orb, shoveling it clear. "Some people think things taste better if you eat them by hand."

"I believe you," Reyes agrees, and pulls her hand to his mouth. Her wrist is scented with vanilla, light and sweet, and he guides her hand up to his face with an easy, deliberate slowness, and when his lips close around her fingers—she only smiles, a long and sleepy grin that drips, falls away from her face.

"Tell me a story?" she asks him. He sucks swatches of chocolate custard from her fingers, he bites them joint by joint. Forget nothing. Sweetness. A hidden filth. He adores her. He wishes she were drunk, that she could stay so open with him forever.

"What kind of a story?"

"One where the bad guys win," Ryder coaxes. She's sticky, beautiful. Without dignity, she becomes irresistible, a fruit split open. She hums her laughter. "Maybe a stupid ending. Set up your plotlines but then some intern trips a line and it all goes up in a fireball. Oops." She rips her fingers free, skinning her knuckles. He dreams of the day she admits her own darkness.

But not today. Reyes lifts one brow, a reprimand. She huffs.

"Alright, fine, no morbid jokes from the Pathfinder. Your point has been made."

"If I don't have your soul of integrity to even me out, we're all but doomed to a cycle of treachery, murder, and exploitative labor laws."

Ryder snorts. "It figures you'd be anti-union."

"Let's not talk politics. I want to tell you your story," Reyes says. He picks up her napkin, begins cleaning her hands. "Are you ready? Here we go. In about ten minutes we'll leave this restaurant. The other patrons, who have nothing better to do than admire you, have probably wondered if the Pathfinder's drunk, or if she always lets men suck on her fingers out in public."

She flinches, and fast as a snake bite, he holds her chin. "Don't look at them."

"Reyes—"

"I said, don't look at them," he repeats softly. The key is not hesitating. Ryder's gaze trembles, arrested. He presses on, "When we leave this place, they'll watch us. They'll wonder what happens next. Most of them will be right, but I'd like to think I have a little more imagination than the average person."

"Oh my _god_ ," Ryder whispers, her cheeks flaring.

Keep going. "So what do you think? What happens next?"

"I think." She stops. Her lips part, tongue sliding heavily over her teeth. He wants to kiss her until the wine stains are gone. He wants her in a way that feels almost violent, almost heavy. He wants to smell whiskey in her hair, again.

"Yes?"

"I think…I think we're _gonna fuck_." She straightens her chin, looks serious for a second. Reyes grins. She's borrowed vulgarity for courage. Ryder squints. "Wait."

"Oh, no. Go on."

"No. Um," her face swings around, cheeks bright, and before she can hesitate anymore he hooks a scoop of chocolate thick across his own thumb, and delivers it between her lips.

Her eyes flutter shut.

"I don't want to fuck you," Reyes murmurs. "Such an old word. Invented by people who didn't know what they were doing."

Her teeth dig into his thumb. Bite harder. He wants bruises from her, he wants evidence. Her tongue searches the joints of his thumb for more. He pulls away and she is messy, she is gorgeous, she is younger than anyone wants to admit.

"An old word?" she manages to joke. "What are the kids calling it these days?"

"I love you," he tells her. "Don't you get it?"

"Yes," she whispers. Her eyes close. "Yes, I do."


End file.
